You are contradicting yourself.  Bitcoin is built on consensus.  If a group controlling 75% of hashpower, i.e. four miners, break lose and force a consensus change to Bitcoin, then it shows Bitcoin is under control by a very small group.  Both user support, and the need for a fork, can be faked like Coinbase does.

If Bitcoin has to be scaled via hard forks pushed by a small group, or if a small group (i.e. 2 miners) can block scaling by blocking a size change, then Bitcoin has to fall under control of a very few number of players to succeed.  This contradicts your previous stance.

Bitcoin programmers don't have powers.  They can not change the consensus rules without making an altcoin.  This is the primary security mechanism in Bitcoin.  If this wasn't true, Bitcoin would be just as worthless as fiat in a bank on Cyprus.  Just see how the Coinbasecoin known as "Classic" works out.  They have almost no user support, except for sockpuppets on Reddit, and even fakes node support through an attack on the bitcoin P2P insfrastructure, and try to provoke user support by spamming the blockchain with unnecessary transactions.  (The Amazon nodes are an attack due to the built-in sybil-resistance in Bitcoin nodes.  Home nodes will create a connection to at most one of those nodes, since it avoids connecting to more than one node per netblock.  The attack nodes will however make 8 outbound connections to people's home nodes, download blocks and transactions, and use a disproportionate amount of their bandwidth.  I had to throttle my outgoing bandwidth to the attack nodes ("Classic" nodes on Amazon servers) because they were consuming all my outgoing bandwidth, and hitting my incoming transactions limit.  To help the network, nodes must be spread out to all corners of the internet.)

There are plenty of altcoins out there, and very easy to vote by your feet now.  Even Coinbase could be honest about it, and fork off their own Coinbasecoin, or "Classic" as they call it, today.  Yet, I can't see Coinbase following that path.  They want to destroy Bitcoin instead, by showing that a small group of people can take control over it.

This is correct, and for that reason Bitcoin should avoid a hard fork at all cost.  Most users and miners know it.  If the hard consensus rules in Bitcoin change, a hostile takeover by a single entity or group of powerful players already happened.

In my experience the relationship is opposite.  Back in 2011 the price rised quickly, and people bought large farms of graphics cards to mine coins.  When the price fell back, and FPGAs came to market, people sold their GPUs to gamers.  The hashrate even went down a while after the 32 USD price peak, since the GPUs weren't profitable any more.  If you compare price and hashrate graphs, it is very clear that hashrate lagged the price.

If a lot of hashrate forks out, other people will come in and replace it.  The cost per hashrate hasn't changed.

No, miners have no word in this.  It is what users use and merchants accept that matters.  If those pools decide to use a different consensus, they will just mine invalid blocks, and invalid coins.  The miners can choose to ignore blocks produced by other miners, of course, but stick to the consensus rules.  This is called a 51% attack, and is a real danger.

That's nothing.  Blockchain.info must do some kind of filtering.  I have 437 MB of unconfirmed transactions in my mempool.  Average fee is 1.05 satoshi/byte, i.e. nothing to worry about.  Keeping the mempool artificially large by spamming free transactions is free, and doesn't impact conformation time of any normal transactions.  Keeping blocks full is free as well.  This is a non-issue.

He is welcome to do that, but will discover it is impossible.  Bitcoin will split immediately, and he will mine worthless coins.

There are other ways to scale.  E.g. if Coinbase could stop making two transactions on the blockchain for every withdrawal a user makes.  Other exchanges on the other hand joins many withdrawals into one transaction, spending a fraction of the blockspace for each withdrawal.  Coinbase have been very vocal on the capacity issue, and instead of taking very simple measures to increase the capacity, they try to take control over Bitcoin to change it for their own purposes.  Coinbase plays very dirty, and I don't think Coinbase should be rewarded for blocking normal transactions by spamming the blockchain, delaying other transactions on purpose.

How large your transaction will be mostly depends on your inputs.  If you typically receive transfers which are much smaller than the one you send, your transaction is going to be very large and expensive, because it has to spend many inputs.  Don't use faucets, because the coins you receive will cost more than their value to spend!  Some wallets, e.g. Bitcoin Core, indicate how much fee you should use to get your transaction confirmed within n blocks.  Bitcoin Core will try to select inputs in a way that your transaction size/fee will be as small as possible.  Many mobile wallets are quite bad in that regard, and some use the same fee regardless of transaction size.

Not even bothering to check.  Those transactions aren't blocking anything but low priority free transactions.  When the mempool is full, the transactions will get cleaned out due to low fee, but will of course trickle back from other nodes over time.  Rinse and repeat..

The most cost effective DoS transaction fee is about 11 satoshi/byte.  It will block all 910-1000 byte transactions from stupid wallets paying 0.0001 BTC fee per chunk of 1000 bytes (I think blockchain.info is that stupid), which is just enough to get noticed.  The theoretical maximum cost of this attack is only 0.11 BTC per block, if there are no other transactions.

I ckecked my mempool right now, btw.  This mempool is limited to 1.5 GB, i.e. much larger than default.

Total size:  38057 transactions
Transactions paying less than 2 satoshi/byte in fees: 35152 (92.3%, 457 MB)

The rest will fit in a block.  Actually some of the less than 2 satoshi/byte transactions will fit as well.

Conclusion: Mempool size is irrelevant.  Anyone can fill up all mempools with free or almost free transactions.

Paying more helps, but it still doesn't do anything about the reasons why low fee transactions won't confirm quickly.

The blocks aren't even full now.  There can only be two reasons for the fees are moving up:
1. The miners demand a higher fee to bother to include it in a block.
2. The spammer(s) pay higher fees.

There is nothing a normal user can do about any of the reasons, and a change of blocksize won't change anything either.

Correct, it just removes most of the the incentive to produce empty blocks.  Meaning it makes more economic sense to include transactions for extra income.

You can, via a soft fork (it is among the proposals for the segwit soft fork), force the miners to include proof of validation of the block they build on.  This will get us most of the way.  By dropping the validation of the previous block, or not even downloading it, miners will get a head start on mining the next block.  If they have to validate the previous block, the cost of adding some transactions to the next block is very low compared to the fees they make.

Men då får jo mottakaren bot eller fengselsstraff dersom han hentar pakken utan å fortolle!  Det må då vere betre å sende pakken gjennom tollen enn å sende kundane i fengsel?  Rein svindel, spør du meg.

What is Satoshi's ideal?  He wanted to create anonymous cash for the internet.  It turned out to be not anonymous at all.  Should we fix that?

He didn't see any good ways to scale, except for increasing blocksize and centralize the blockchain.  Now that we know better, should we do it?

He didn't want people to mine with their GPUs, becuase he had ment that every user should mine ("vote") with their CPUs.  Then we got FPGA mining, and now we even have large centralized ASIC mining factories.  Should we fix that?

More viable ways scales up the parts of bitcoin which needs to scale up.  We need to make it possible to transact faster, cheaper and more often.  We do not need to increase the amount of resources needed for every node in the system.

The Bitcoin blockchain was designed as a settlement layer.  It has never been possible to transact instantly with Bitcoin.  0 confirmation transactions have the same security as "the check is in the mail".  If I had sent bitcoin to an excange an hour ago now, the transaction would only have four confirmations.  I would need two more confirmations before my coins are credited, and I can exchange them for money.  Lightning can enable instant transactions by building on top of the settlement layer below, where the transaction, or the start and endpoint of a chain of transactions, will be commited later.

The commersial pressure from Coinbase and others, which are under strong regulatory pressure to do chain analysis and watch how their users are spending their money, have failed to gain much support.  Instead they fake support by paying for lits of nodes at data centers, like this.  By enabling new technologies, Bitcoin can finally be this ubiquitous electronic token which is usable for everything from large settlements to instant micropayments.

I think the opposite is true.  Traditionally Bitcoin has only been usable for relatively fast (~ 1 hour) and cheap settlements worldwide 24/7.  Not really for e.g. paying your bar tab at the end of a long evening.  Not all bartenders will accept "the check is in the mail" as payment when you are about to leave.  Both sidechains, payment channels and Lightning will make Bitcoin more flexible, useful for more purposes, and accessible to more people.

I don't think an altcoin for every single purpose is a good idea.  I remember travelling through Europe before the Euro.  I was used to it then, but now I hope we never return to the pre-Euro days.  It was a hassle to keep exchanging my money from one currency to another at every border, and of course the exchangers took a high percentage every time.  Even if I didn't spend anything, I would get home with much less money than I had when I left.  Imagine if each of the states in the US had a different currency.  It would certainly limit free movement of capital inside the country. 

This was a suggestion.  Satoshi dropped it, because it was a bad idea.  Everyone (almost) can see it is a terrible idea, so it wasn't implemented by anyone else either.  Satoshi had a lot of ideas which he later dropped.  He even asked people to stop GPU mining, because he thought every user should mine with their CPUs.  Go home and tell your granny bitcointalk isn't the Bible.  Or demand a PoW change to make it possible for everyone to mine with their CPUs again, or whatever.  (This is exactly why many of the altcoins exists, btw.)

Satoshi had many conflicting views.  He initially thought Bitcoin would be much more anonymous than it turned out to be.  He also thought the blockchain would reside in a big data center while all users ran SPV wallets, which would completely remove all anonymity.  This is what Coinbase wants, and basically mimics how credit cards work.  Satoshi didn't think of advances like Lightning and sidechains, which would improve on both anonymity and decentralization, but he made the scripting system flexible enough to allow for future advances in the technology.  Why is it so important to you to stop progress?

Not really.  This was a bugfix.  Entirely uncontroversial.  So far not a single (known to anyone) block has been produced on the other side, so strictly speaking it isn't even a fork.  This did not come as a surprise to me, perhaps to you.

I am not religious.  I quote Satoshi for facts, not beliefs.  Smarter people have taken over development, and have found much more viable ways to scale bitcoin.  You need to understand the difference between how it is and how it can be (or could have been if things were done differently back in 2010).

Satoshi defined the consensus rules back in 2009, and it is enforced by nodes running the software called Bitcoin Core.  Core cannot change this consensus, and it is not affected by feelings or whatever.  Nobody can.  Not even by trolls on Bitcointalk.  Anyone can make the rules stricter, Core as well, and this will be successful if a majority of hashrate agrees.  Single miners can even enforce stricter rules for only the blocks this miner produce, and it will work.  This won't do any harm.  All nodes validating the blocks will find them to be valid, and all services will continue to work.

There are plenty altcoins adhering to different consensus rules.  Their blocks are invalid to Bitcoin.

Yes, I do.  A hard fork will essentially make an altcoin.  One valid chain, and one which is only valid for the altcoin.  There are several attempts to make new altcoins with larger blocksizes.  E.g. "BitcoinXT", "Classic",  "Unlimited", "BitPay Core" and whatever.  I have lost count.  Bitcoin has 1 MB blocks.  It is defined by the consensus rules.  Larger blocks will be invalid to Bitcoin nodes.  Those specific altcoins are special in the way they are premined.  You can import a Bitcoin wallet into an altcoin node, split your coins by e.g. mixing with altcoin, and then exchange your altcoins for Bitcoin on Cryptsy or one of the other altcoin exchanges. 

If you didn't want to know, why did you ask if I was an author?

Yes, but very slowly if depending on priority alone.  The worst spam storm may be over, btw.  The number of fee paying transactions in my mempool has been slowly decreasing for the last few hours.

Yes, Core defines consensus for Bitcoin, and the core consensus rules were set in stone from the point when Satoshi released version 0.1.  If you don't believe me, read his words for it here.  If you see two posts later down, you will see Gavin defining his future role in Bitcoin.

Attempts to break the consensus rules will make an altcoin.  In principle anyone can do a soft fork by enforcing new rules, stricter than the rules in Core, and this will make a soft fork.  It will not succeed however, unless there is a clear majority supporting it.  Older nodes, all versions, will continue working after a soft fork.

I have been using Bitcoin since 2010, and exchange bitcoins for a living.  The health and development of Bitcoin is vital to my business, and for that reason I follow it closely.  I have no connection with the author of the article.

You don't understand the difference between a hard and a soft fork.  A soft fork adds new rules, which can be done without breaking the consensus defined by Bitcoin Core (all versions).